WASHINGTON, Feb 5: Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday that he would seek ‘more in-depth’ cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against terrorism when he visited Islamabad on Feb 15.
“We’d like to find how (the terrorists) are trained, where they are trained,” Mr Karzai said on CNN’s Late Edition.
He said he was seeking Pakistan’s cooperation to prevent the terrorists from entering Afghanistan. “We must stop them from crossing the Afghan border before they reach the border,” he added.
Mr Karzai said Afghanistan also hoped to increase cooperation with Pakistani security forces along the Pakistan-Afghan-border.
In the same show, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Lt-Gen Karl W. Eikenberry said catching Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar would not end the war against Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
This was the first direct endorsement by a senior US military commander of the views expressed last week by President Pervez Musharraf in an interview to Washington Post. The president had said catching bin Laden or his lieutenant Ayman al Zawahiri would not have a major impact on Al Qaeda’s ability to conduct operations around the world.
Endorsing the views, Gen Eikenberry said the war was not about one man…. “It’s a global network … with financial connections all over the world.”
The US general compared Al Qaeda to an electricity supply system, saying bringing down one grid or blowing up a transformer would not finish the network.
Osama bin Laden, he said, was important for the US and “we would not rest until he is found or killed … but this war is not about one man.”
